“I’m an audience member, that’s what I am,” says the 57-year-old man sitting opposite me. “An audience member that’s seen fuckloads of comedy.” You may not know the name Steve Bennett, but everyone in British comedy does. Bennett reckons he sees around 300 comedy shows a year. As a reviewer, he wields a power that belies his anonymity to the man on the street. If you’re a comedian, a great review from Bennett could transform your career.
Only a few websites in the UK exclusively dedicate themselves to comedy. Chortle, Bennett’s baby, is the most significant. It presents itself as “the UK comedy guide”, and among British comics it more than lives up to this moniker, viewed as the most important arbiter of taste in the industry. Comedians are likely to parade around a great Chortle review for the entirety of their career. At the Edinburgh Fringe, the annual meat market of British comedy which begins this weekend, in which thousands of comics vie for the attention of reviewers, agents and producers, Chortle comes into its own. When I say “it”, I mean Bennett – for two and a half decades, Chortle has been run entirely by one man.
Bennett has been fascinated by comedy since childhood. As a boy, living in Solihull, he would listen on repeat to his dad’s Jasper Carrott comedy albums. At school, where he was in the same year as Stewart Lee, he ran a satirical magazine called Below the Belt. He was so attached to the magazine that he transplanted it to the University of Oxford, where he studied physics.
Bennett found physics extremely hard, and started spinning various other plates. He became the social secretary of his college, St Peter’s, which involved booking comedians for shows. He was the de facto compere, “but I would hesitate to use that word,” he says, “because I am not good onstage”. It was an exciting time to be involved in comedy as an undergraduate: Bennett remembers Armando Iannucci, Rebecca Front and David Schneider all being there, and Stewart Lee had followed him from the Solihull school.
Out of university, Bennett went from being a reporter for a publication about overseas properties (which went bust after a couple of years because “the editor was a complete pisshead”) to a TV listings paper called London Life, and then The Recorder, a local newspaper group. He lived in West Ealing and regularly came to see a new act competition at The Bearcat, a comedy night in the area. This is what got him into the habit of seeing live comedy. It’s where he and I are having our chat. Bennett is grey-haired with glasses, and talks so quickly sometimes that I am forced to slow my dictaphone down in order to work out exactly what he has said. Self-confessedly “nerdy”, he looks almost exactly how you might imagine someone who taught themselves coding in order to run a comedy website would.
While he was working in newspapers in the late nineties he pitched internet ideas to his employers. They couldn’t see the potential that he saw. He noticed that areas like film and music had devoted publications and websites – movies had Empire; music had NME – but there was a gap in the market for comedy. He started work on Chortle in 1999, learning HTML to make the website work. It went live in 2000.
Bennett began by reviewing club comics, who often took it He knows that there are plenty of comedians who must think of him as “an utter bastard”. But when I survey a group of London comics and promoters, they agree that he is a real force for good in the industry. One comic says Bennett is only disliked because “everyone wants Father’s approval”. Another says, “Steve seems like a good egg. He knows his onions. He doesn’t make a gig all about himself when he’s in the room, preferring to hide at the back, unlike some reviewers.”
Bennett believes his website is “what the internet should have been”, Bennett says. “Independent people setting up their own little businesses or websites with their own passions.” Currently it makes up 35-40 per cent of his income. “It’s still a labour of love more than a financially successful website,” he says. (He is a sub-editor for newspapers the rest of the time.) Its revenue comes from advertising and an Edinburgh Fringe gig called Chortle’s Fast Fringe, at which about a dozen comics perform three minutes of their show.
The Edinburgh Fringe is the most important event in the comedy calendar. This is where careers are made, stars are born and breakdowns begin. Performing the same show for a month can thrill or kill comedians. All of the comedy cognoscenti are gathered within a couple of miles of one another. The world’s media are there. Agents. PR. Managers. The most famous comics on Earth. This year there are at least 1,662 comedy shows. Edinburgh in August is the most exciting place on the planet for anyone who wants to perform comedy.
And the Fringe is where Bennett tears about, doing what he does best. When he is up there, he sees five gigs a day for almost a month – about half his annual tally. A five-star (or a one-star) review from Chortle has the capacity to completely transform a performer’s Fringe. Comics obsess over his opinion. He was once going to review the comedian Robert White, when White made a mistake and asked if there were any reviewers in. Bennett owned up. “And he couldn’t go on,” he remembers. He offered to leave but White couldn’t perform any more.
Several hours after we chat at the pub, I witness Bennett’s unnerving power in the flesh. I thought it would be a good idea to see him reviewing, so we met at the Soho Theatre to watch a late-night show together. The bar is always crawling with comedians. Before we go in, a comic whom Bennett had watched earlier in the evening thanks him profusely for being there. He calls him a “big dog” in the industry. (The subsequent review is a kind 3.5 stars.)
In our show, Bennett sits in the middle of the middle row and has a little notepad on his knee. The comic, whose show is structured improvisation, knows Bennett is in. Beforehand he had told me that Bennett’s presence would be tricky. “If I openly acknowledge that I’m anxious because Steve’s in the room and the audience responds, it’s very easy for me to keep leaning into that anxiety or even frustration. Before I know it, a throwaway observation about Steve’s presence can become a running theme, and the show starts orbiting him more than it otherwise would.”
This well-articulated worst-case scenario is almost exactly what materialises half-way through the show. The comic can see the critic, and looks at him knowingly on more than one occasion. Bennett’s presence does indeed seem to throw him, even if he doesn’t make the show entirely about him. The show spirals into anarchy. The subsequent three-star review acknowledges that the comic got stuck in his own head a little (as well as having technical problems) but Bennett has enough humility not to say that this was because of him. He is aware of it, though, and he resorts to physics by way of explanation: “It’s the Heisenberg Principle: you can’t measure something without affecting it.” (Strictly speaking, “the observer effect” is what Bennett is describing, but he did stop studying physics 37 years ago.)
Reviewing of any description demands that you try as best you can to approach each subject afresh. Having seen almost 10,000 gigs, Bennett must find this difficult. “In short, yes, I probably have got a bit… no, I definitely don’t want to say the word ‘jaded’. Your tastes refine, I guess. I guess my tolerance for the fine has gone, a bit.” Or, in other words, as he puts it, “I don’t wanna puff on your joint any more, I can just inject some heroin.”
But he remains steadfastly committed to the job, relishing the difficulty of explaining what did and didn’t work about a show. He is never viscerally horrible about a performer – which makes his reviews harder to shrug off. “Five stars or one star just pour out of you,” Bennett says, “because you want to tell people how wonderful this show is, or warn them how terrible it is. But most things are kind of in the middle.” Here I have to admit that I have experienced an in-the-middle review from Bennett when my sketch group performed a narrative show in 2017. “There are some amusing running gags that fit the narrative and the characters,” he wrote, “but also too many surreal non-sequiturs that seem bolted-on, and trying too hard to be bizarre.” A year later he came to a different show and gave us a glowing review. While I obviously agree with every word of the latter, I also think the negative write-up is 100 per cent accurate: Bennett noticed important flaws that we optimistically tried to ignore while developing the show.
Bennett seems like a completist – someone who strives to have every one of his toes in every corner of the comedy pond at the same time. “Oh, I’m definitely a workaholic,” he says. “Yeah, definitely. And I think with something like this you kind of have to be. Obviously it’s a hugely hungry beast. Part of it’s my own pressure – from a news background, you want to put as much stuff out as you can.” Is he happy? He thinks so. “It’s hard work, and that’s the downside, but lots of jobs are hard work – and they don’t involve fucking off to Edinburgh for a month.”
[Further reading: No laughing matter]
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